Good evening, I am designing an RPG and attempting to teach myself all the relevant skills involved in producing the game.

Before you all laugh, I am not attempting to complete the game as a one man army, I just want to learn a decent amount of art and design so that when I hire an artist, I can more accurately describe what I want in some of their own language.

And so that when I hire a programmer, I can more accurately describe what I want in some of their own language. Besides, the more I learn, the more it all affects my concept (as in, what is realistic, what is workable, what is standard, and so on). Basically I want to be the best team leader I can by having at least some knowledge of all the relevant areas.

Also I just love learning stuff.

Anyway, this is the code I have so far, using Visual C++ 2010 with SDL.

I have copied most of this stuff from websites, so most of it I genuinely have no idea what it does. But after hours of furious tweaking, it creates a screen in the size I want and displays two images I want for 5 seconds. A pretty big win for someone fumbling along.

My question is, where do I insert code to tell the program to 'fade in' the logo, then fade it out again (over a total period of 3 seconds), and what what would that code look like?

Then I would like it to fade in and fade in a second image over 5 seconds, what would that code look like?

Thank you for your time and putting up with my awkward starting point.

I would personally recommend against using code that you find on the web if you have no idea what it does. When something goes wrong (and it often does in programming) you'll have no idea what might be the problem, where is it, or how to fix it. Work through tutorials, books and references, and find it what each lines means. At the very least, get a general idea.